[lbrandy]

Hi. I worked on Facebook's anti-abuse infrastructure for awhile (I'm still at Facebook, but working on different things now). So while I didn't personally fight spam/fake accounts, I worked closely with those who did. I'll be blunt: based on this and your other comments, you don't know what you're talking about.

I'll go a step further and give you some unsolicited advice. The anti-abuse community amongst internet/game/tech companies is actually fairly close knit since it's one of the few places where everyone is on the same side and lots of "secrets" are shared (including, even, at the spam fighting conference we organized last year). I would bet a lot of people just rolled their eyes while learning of your company for the first time. You're already entangled in one argument from someone calling you on this silliness, but I assure they're not alone. I'd probably suggest reconsidering this approach.

[troisx]

I'll be blunt, too. I'm interested to know why it's so easy for Facebook users like me to spot fake accounts and report them, while your crack team at Facebook constantly ignores them and allows them to continue proliferating. I'm guessing you didn't get an inside look at Facebook's accounting that disincentivizes removing these fake profiles. Or do you have a better reason that Facebook repeatedly ignores reports of obviously fake users?

[aandon]

Indeed I know it's a close-knit community. Most of our 20-person team came from anti-fraud teams at Google. I'm guessing the "silliness" you're referring to is the talk of Facebook not being incentivized to block spammers. I think kbenson articulated best what I was trying to say, that there are tradeoffs in blocking good users and decreasing apparent user volume when fighting fraud. Facebook would obviously not be wise to catch every single fraudster because there would be a high number of false positives, so a balance must be struck. As I'm sure you know, fraud teams at many companies often clash with the marketing team because they're protecting the bottom line (sometimes at the expense of the top line) respectively, and vice versa.

[Wagthesam]

I worked at a company with a spam variable in the backend. 0 for eliminating most spam engagement actions like likes. 1 for letting all spam in.

We didn't set it to 0.

There's sometimes positive value in spam. Ex Instagram users get a boost when their pictures are liked, by someone real or not.

[chinathrow]

Wow, what a statement from someone so close to it. Not sure how to look at it.

We recently bought some likes for a page via FBs internal system. The likes we eventually received were nearly 100% identical in terms of names, looks (mostly arabian or oriental), even though the region we targeted was within central Europe - and lot's of obvious fake accounts in there.

[leesalminen]

I used their Pixel + Create an Audience tool to target a Page Like campaign at people who have visited my businesses' website previously. Very low spam / fake account % on that campaign.

[arcticfox]

I'm curious: do you think Facebook's anti-fraud measures are effective?